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How to: set up Mozilla Thunderbird 2 to send and receive e-mail

This article explains how to set up Mozilla Thunderbird 2 to collect your e-mail from your ServeLink Linux / PHP site, and download it to your computer using the POP3 protocol.  You will have already created an email account in the server control panel.  The set up dialog to send and receive mail with Mozilla Thunderbird can be found within Thunderbird at Tools > Account Settings > Add Account.

Select "Email account" and click "Next":




Then enter your desired Display Name and the name of the e-mail account you're working with, and click "Next":




On the next screen select POP3 and enter the mail server name of your own site as the "Incoming Mail Server"; this will be something like mail.yoursitename.com.

Many major ISPs insist that you use their mail servers to send mail, so it's easiest to do that for the "Outgoing mail server (SMTP)" setting, there is more help with outgoing server names here

Click "Next":




For the "Incoming User Name" you must use the full e-mail address of the e-mail account you have already configured in the ServeLink server control panel.

As we are at this point using your ISP to send the outgoing mail however, the "Outgoing User Name" will be the user name that applies to your ISP.

Click "Next":




Now you will give your new account a convenient name to refer to it by, any name is fine, and click "Next":




The final screen of this section is simply a summary of all your settings so far.  Review them and click "Finish" and then "OK":




The first time you connect you will be asked for a password.  Enter the password here that you first chose when you created the e-mail account in the ServeLink server control panel, and check the box to have Thunderbird remember it for you.   Finally click "OK" twice and you're done:




With the setup so far you are using your ISP's mail server for outgoing mail, so if you have problems sending messages you should check with them.   If you need to use our mail servers to send the mail then read on.






Using our SMTP servers
There are just a couple of extra steps if you wish to use our SMTP servers, assuming your ISP will permit SMTP traffic to pass through their network.   First, go back to Tools > Account Settings, select "Outgoing Server (SMTP)" and click "Edit":




Complete the next dialog, choosing the same "Server Name" as you used earlier for "Incoming Server Name"; that will be something like mail.myectstore.com.   Use your full e-mail address as the "User Name" and complete the port number and SSL selections as shown here.   Click "OK" twice:




The first time you send a message you will see a security warning, you can safely ignore that and just click through that with "OK".   It appears because there is no certificate for your domain name on the mail server, but it is still secured using our servelink.com certificate.   If it appears repeatedly you can stop that behavior with this extension for Thunderbird https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2131 :




And again the first time you connect to send mail you will be asked for a password.   Enter the password here that you first chose when you created the e-mail account in the ServeLink server control panel, and check the box to have Thunderbird remember it for you.   Finally click "OK" twice and you're done:




That's all, you should now be sending and receiving mail using Thunderbird.